"I wrote this poem’s wild ride after years of tinkering with a short poem about a homesick conquistador. I needed to summon the ghosts of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Walt Whitman to channel my own ambiguous, mixed-race, part-plant nature into being. Time-travelling, I want to see the giant Olmec heads in situ gazing out to sea, toward our crazed future."
Desirée Alvarez on "Primero Sueño, First Dream: On Crossing, A Whitmanesque" |
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What Sparks Poetry:
J. Michael Martinez on "The Wake of Maria de Jesus Martinez"
“'The Wake of Maria De Jesus Martinez' was one attempt to write, as form, a casta-like poem, where each section of the lyric was itself of a different time and space, yet, linked through repeating phrases. As the lyric progressed, the work began to be less 'pictorial' and relied more and more on sound: the emotional labor of the poem was performed/rendered through its music." |
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